Intersectionality and Responsive Representation

Who do government ministers listen to, and how does this affect what they say and do? While there has been a great deal of scholarship the substantive representation of marginalised groups, it remains challenging to capture the ‘behind the scenes’ aspects of the representative process. This paper conducts a novel analysis of a newly-available dataset of meetings between UK government ministers and external organisations, as well as transcripts of parliamentary debates. Focusing on women’s political representation from an intersectional perspective, I investigate the effect of ministers’ racial, gendered, and partisan identities on a) whether and to what extent they engage with women’s organisations, b) which women’s organisations they engage with, and c) the effects of this engagement on parliamentary speech. More broadly, I argue that analyses of women’s representation must centre the question of ‘which women’ as well as the relationship between civil society organisations as constitutive representatives and parliamentarians as substantive representatives.